Gordon McLauchlan: Spare us the business euphemisms

One of the most successful subterranean public relations campaigns in recent years has been conducted by business organisations, aided and abetted by complicit journalists, in devising a euphemism for corporates - "wealth creators".

I say "subterranean" because the term has surfaced in many Western countries - used perhaps most profusely here in New Zealand, though - without the public seeming to notice. Yet. It is, nevertheless, a candy phrase designed to sweeten the image of business and make us feel grateful to the corporate lobby.

The truth is, of course, that some corporates create jobs and add to the wealth of the community in many ways; others don't; and some are even wealth destroyers because of incompetent management or, rarely in this country, criminal activity.

It's fair to say that vigorously entrepreneurial businesspeople are even more susceptible to venality than most of us because their activities are fundamentally built on the need for profit above all else.

That's not to suggest that buying and selling goods and services are not important to the functioning of human society. Business was the incentive for written language and for other technological advances. Over the centuries traders often transported enlightenment from one country to another while enlarging the range of goods and services available within remote communities, enabling them to develop wealthier economies of their own.

But there's nothing sacred about trade. Traders also shipped blacks from Africa to the plantations of the Americas. They still ship guns to dictators, and drugs to the hollow people of modern cities.

Like all areas of human activity there are good guys and bad guys in business, as well as the talented and the inept.

Song and story are also important to the functioning of human society. But what would be the response if writers, painters, composers and film-makers called themselves "culture creators"? They would rightly be jeered at.

It is even more ridiculous to call the generality of corporates "wealth creators" than to call physicians "health creators" or plumbers "sanitary engineers". With his usual directness, writer George Orwell described such language as designed to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

"Wealth creators" is pure wind designed to help special pleading. A few years ago, business lobbyists and sympathetic politicians put their puff behind the trickle-down effect, a phrase you never hear now because it is discredited. "Wealth creators" is much shrewder for being vaguer, more abstract.

At one time in New Zealand political power was weighted in favour of farmers and we were often nagged into giving them special taxation treatment and other forms of economic deference because the rest of us were allegedly riding "on the sheep's back". Farmers then didn't have the sophisticated public relations support the business lobby can buy today to sweeten the breath of its wind, but in New Zealand and Australia many a law congenial to farmers rode into and out of Parliament on the sheep's back.

Then - as now with "wealth creators" - lay an implication that the rest of us were bludgers.

In the simple economy of that time farmers could more reasonably be tagged creators of wealth than the full range of players in the intricate finance-dominated commerce of today. Actually the economy is now riding on the cow's back but, because their numbers and lobbying power have diminished, dairy farmers just get on with it.

Business lobbies vigorously for advantages they insist will expand the wealth of the nation, especially for tax cuts and deregulation that will free up the much vaunted entrepreneurial spirit. But other social considerations must be respected, too.

The Resource Management Act is dysfunctional. Some want it dismantled. Good citizens will want it amended to make it work properly in its attempt to protect the environment and to give as wide a range of people as possible a reasonable say in development without being needlessly obstructive.

Democracy does have a way of working through to realities. It may take time for phrases that don't ring true, like wealth creators, to be seen for what they are, but it does happen.

Public relations practitioners seldom look at the long term or they would be more fastidious with language.

B EHIND the big picture of the truculence of the Bush Administration dissent is growing among many sectors of the American community. The Des Moines Register last weekend carried a story under the heading "George Bush, War Criminal?" in which a Midwestern law professor challenged the legality of any attack on Iraq under the United States constitution and because it would constitute a war of aggression under the UN Charter. He did so, he said, "in contrast to the almost total silence that has gripped our elected officials, our mainstream media and 'responsible' others".

This was followed three days later by a letter to the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Anan, from International Law Scholars, representing law professors from some top American universities and from India, Switzerland, Australia, Malaysia and Egypt. It, too, challenges the "threat of an illegal war against Iraq, the onset of which arguably would pose the most serious threat to world legal order since World War II".

If the Iraq war does go ahead, I think New Zealand should invade Tonga to effect a regime change because the King is preparing to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, to whit, cigarettes. Also it would give us a chance to export our beautiful, flawless brand of "freedom and demarcracy".

After that we could move on Fiji which, I think, has too many chiefs and not enough Indians.